Posts tagged ‘exercise’

In one, frantic breath as we prepared to go for a bike ride, Birdy proclaims:

“We need to put a bottle of water in the bike basket and a snack in case I get hungry and a snack in case you get hungry or if you have a low blood sugar and your glucose meter and the glucose tabs in case you have a low blood sugar for real and in case I want to have one – that’s a joke, Mom, but really I can have a teeny, teeny bite if I want one, right? – and I will wear my helmet and you can walk while I ride on my bike and I’ll keep my eyes forward so I don’t fall off.”

Our version of “going for a bike ride” might sound complicated, but we do our thing and we do it well.

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Feeling crummy is a slippery slope for me, in that acknowledging it is a healthy move, but if I cater to it, I’ll get sucked down the rabbit hole of feeling overwhelmingly crummy. I’m not even sure that makes sense when you read it, but it does to me, so there it stays.

Three years ago, I went through a pronounced emotional slump and it was not my favorite time in life. I am not interested in going back to that place, emotionally or physically, so I’m attempting to head it off at the pass.

Things That Help Immediately:

Exercising. Sounds so simple, because it is, but it helps. Being outside, either walking or running, helps my brain. It makes me feel better. Sitting around all day long and staring at my computer trying to make the writing thing happen doesn’t do much for me, but going for a run jogs my brain (ha – weak pun but a pun all the same) back into gear. It’s like I physically require 10,000 steps in the day before my mind decides to get creative again. Which is fine by me.

Paying Attention to Food. When I’m in a crappy mood, I will drink coffee all day and maybe have a protein bar, but that’s it. And that sucks, because my body needs more diversity/nutrients/how about a hard-boiled egg, motherfucker. Cooking hasn’t ever been something I’ve enjoyed, but I’ve always liked eating well, and looking back at a day’s worth of food that isn’t dominated by iced coffee and the random Luna bar is a plus. The better the food, the better I feel.

Engaging in the Moment. I have a tendency to get tangled up in the to do lists in my mind, and the things I haven’t done yet eat away at me. To the point of anxiety, which is ridiculous, because so many of those to dos are fun and things I like, yet they’re still stressing me out? No, no, no. When I’m on the slippery slope towards Crumbdom, I don’t enjoy the moments I’m in, but instead I fret about the shit I haven’t accomplished yet. Again: no, no, no. It helps if I make the conscious decision to ease up a little, like going to the zoo with Birdy instead of staying home and freaking out. It also helps to hug my kid, and my husband, and the cats. They are all warm and snuggly creatures, and they make me feel good.

I’m glad there are things I can do to help feel better, to shake off the ennui. I feel better when I’m doing something, and best when that something involves my family. I can’t change all of the things that are weighing heavily, but I can refocus on the things that bring me joy, damn it.

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I think it’s safe to say that the threat of snow is behind us. (If not, this cat is going to be pissed.) And now that the weather is improved and exercising outside can be A Thing, I’ve taken to long, fast-paced walks around my neighborhood in the late afternoon, spending about 45 minutes each night clearing my head and lowering my blood sugar.

“Bye, Birdy. I’ll be back in about an hour. I love you,” I say to my daughter, kissing her on the head as I put my headphones in my ears. “Are you sure you don’t mind if I leave?” I ask Chris, and he always says, “Of course not.” But still, I feel like a crumb because I’m headed out by myself, leaving my family at home. I’m removing myself from “family time.” It feels like I’m ditching them. (And I want to write that last part in a teeny, tiny font because it feels crappy to admit it.)

But it’s not like Birdy cries when I leave. (To be honest, she barely gives me the time of day when I leave, especially if she’s eating dinner or watching TV.) And it’s not like Chris can’t, or doesn’t want, to spend time with our kid. The guilt I feel isn’t handed out by my family, but instead it’s something I apply to myself, rubbing it on thick and heavy, like sunscreen.

I go because I know exercise is important not only for my physical body, but to help calm the circus that’s constantly performing in my mind.

When I run, I like to listen to music that my feet can keep pace with (this is my favorite running playlist at the moment), but for walking, I like to listen to podcasts. And lately, I’ve been spending my nighttime walks with the DSMA Live team (Scott, George, and Cherise, and occasionally Lorraine and Bennet).

I loved hearing this concept explored, out loud. Self-care is necessary for a healthy run with diabetes, but sometimes self-care is unfairly reassigned as “selfish.” I feel guilty about taking time to go to the gym or go for a walk or run, but I shouldn’t. I know I shouldn’t. I can’t take good care of my family if my own health is compromised. Self-care feels selfish when I’m leaving my family at home so I can go exercise, but I need to shake that sentiment off in pursuit of better.

“I hope my child learns about self-care,” offered Melissa. “My husband and I are from families where self-care was never modeled for us. We saw a lot of self-neglect at the expense of caring for others. Caring for yourself was considered selfish, but I hope that my generation of mothers is teaching their children that we care best for others when we meet our own needs, too. I want my children to watch me count my carbs and go to the doctor and meet others with my condition. I want them to know that we don’t hide in the dark with our worries or our obstacles. We take care of ourselves so that we can live life to the fullest.”

Her words stuck in my head for months and resurfaced again when I was listening to the podcast as I took my walk. It was easier to push any guilt away, knowing I wasn’t the only parent or PWD who struggled with self-care.

“Self-care isn’t selfish,” is something I thought about with each step, listening to my friends chatting in my ear while I walked, knowing my actions were rooted in the desire to become a healthy old lady who refused to give in to diabetes.

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Running alone brings out the Spibelt, and I cram it full of my on-the-move necessities: glucose tabs, Dexcom receiver, keys, and phone. Even though it’s reasonably streamlined and doesn’t bother me too much to tote around all that stuff, it’s a bulkier system than, oh, I don’t know … making my own insulin.

But lo! The child rides a bike! And insisted on having a bicycle basket! To which I said, “Yes! Excellent idea and can you please carry all my shit, too?” only I did not cuss at the child!

The miles might be logged a little slower than when I’m by myself, but there’s nothing more convenient than making use of her bike basket to carry all my diabetes stuff, and I love sharing some outside play moments with my daughter.

And she likes being in charge of such important things, since she is a “big girl” and can “carry the glucose tabs because then if I want a very, very, very small bite of a glucose tabs, I can just reach in and have one, right, Mawm?”

“Sure. But only if you make sure you slow down if I need a glucose tab, okay?”

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Dead Poet’s Society. It might be a film from 1989, but it remains one of my favorites largely in part to Josh Charles as Knox Overstreet.

(He doesn’t care that Chris is with Chet. Carpe diem! And there’s a point to this – stick with me.)

Chris and I don’t watch a lot of television, but we have been swept up in the whole binge-watching phenomenon afforded by outlets like iTunes, Netflix, and Amazon Prime. Even though we were late in getting into Breaking Bad, we caught up last year in a hurry just in time to immerse ourselves into the broadcast of the second half of season five (technology, bitch!) We didn’t watch The Wire when it was originally broadcasted, but we did rip through five seasons of that show in a hurry. And we finished True Detective last night (even though I will admit that I didn’t catch everything everyone was saying because the mumbling was oh my). Binge!!

But we don’t watch every show together. The Good Wife, which I’ve just recently started watching while doing longer, steady cardio workouts at the gym, is my go-to show to watch solo. Which brings us back to Knox Overstreet, because he’s a lead character in The Good Wife. And for at least 40 minutes every day, for the last two weeks or so, good ol’ Knox has been helping me earn my steps for the day.

Last week, though, I made the mistake of trying to binge-watch at the gym and mistakenly lost track of time and blood sugars. Instead of taking a peek at my Dexcom every ten minutes or so, I totally spaced. Which meant that I did an hour of walking/running “blinded.” I should have checked my blood sugar. Instead, I walked to the car in a staggered pattern, not unlike Billy from Family Circus, unlocking the car door and haphazardly throwing all my junk onto the passenger seat while simultaneously fumbling for my glucose meter.

It’s funny (not really) how the symptoms are dammed up until I see the number, and then once I am aware of my actual blood sugar, the dam gives and hot damn, panic hits. My car, for a brief moment, looked like I let a glucose tab dust genie loose from its lamp as I worked through five glucose tabs. I sat and waited until the feeling came back to my lips and my hands stopped shaking, then checked my blood sugar again to make sure I was okay enough to drive home.

The lesson learned? If I’m going to spend more than my fair share of time watching Knox Overstreet woo Nurse Carol Hathaway, I need to watch my Dexcom graph closely. Binge-watching is apparently the leading cause of Sparling low blood sugars.

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Oh hell yes I am, and I needed one. Over the last few weeks, I’ve completely fallen off in terms of exercise. I could blame the endless winter weather, or work, or the endless fuzzy hairballs that are Loopy and Siah, but the truth is, I just got lazy. Laziness turned into apathy, and apathy turned into a bad habit of not exercising much at all.

Not cool, because my blood sugars/weight/emotions fare best when I’m active. Sounds trite, but it’s true.

I’ve taken up with a new fitness tracker, and one that motivates me less because it’s tracking activity and more because it’s connecting me with some folks to engage in some friendly “account-a-tition” (accountability + competitiveness). And that’s the theme of this month’s Animas column:

“… so now I had a way of tracking what I was doing, exercise-wise, and a group of people to help keep me accountable. THIS was exactly the boost I needed to pull me out of the exercise doldrums. Now, instead of relying on my sometimes-hard-to-find motivation, I could turn to the DOC to help motivate me. The application, much like other fitness tracker applications, allows people to cheer one another on, and share daily workout stats. Were my fellow PWDs logging nine, ten, … thirteen thousand steps per day? Were they finding ways to eek out a little more exercise? I was inspired to follow suit. “

Click over to Animas for a read, and since I needed to keep the type of tracker brand-agnostic for purposes of that column, I’ll say here that I’m using a FitBit, and if you’d like to connect, let’s do it!

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After a long day of diabetes rule-following and making an attempt to log all of my actions [insert laugh track here], I started drumming up another diabetes application wishlist. Because I’m beyond tired of having five different devices that speak entirely different languages/require different charging cords/can’t work on the operating system I use/hate the idea of integration.

I’m in wicked curmudgeon mode today. But stay on my lawn for a few more minutes, because I have a list, a la Veruca Salt.

I want a diabetes application:

… that auto-magically siphons the results from my glucose meter and logs them in a lovely, color-coded graph and logbook on my phone and on my computer.

Yes, I want my data on my phone and my computer, because while my phone is with me constantly and is good for everyday spot-checking, I like having the bulk of my data stored on my computer so I can see a week at a glance, a month at a glance, and a clue as to what my A1C might be at a glance.

I want to be able to email all of this data as a PDF (because Excel and I have a less than harmonious relationship) to my healthcare professional and whoever else I choose. Or I can print it and put it into a blood sugar binder that I do not currently have but would have if my logbooks were this easy to compile.

And then, the data from my pump should just as easily be pulled off and graphed neatly alongside the data of my glucose meter. Insulin doses plotted alongside blood sugar checks, with the option to add a smiley face when I fucking well feel like it because some days deserve a big, fat smiley face.

(Frowny faces and other emoticons would be a nice bonus, to add in accordance with my whims, as emoticons are sometimes the only recourse I have against a day that’s been truly and mind-bogglingly ridiculous in those ways only diabetes can be.)

It should go without saying, but I’ll say it: the data from my Dexcom should follow the same sharing and integration platform, living in logbook and pie chart harmony with my glucose meter and insulin pump. And all of that data should be visible on all operating systems EVEN A MAC HOW ‘BOUT THAT?!

I want to be able to look at this data in several different ways: at-a-glance, where I can see how my day is going (similar to the One Touch Reveal app); how a week looks, where I can see data broken into high-level pie charts, detailed logbooks, and a bunch of in-between options; and what I’d call an A1C level-glance, which would give me data (detailed and high-level) about how all of my numbers have tracked over the course of three months.

All of this data should move from my devices to the application without needing to cobble together proprietary cables. Bluetooth is fine. Cloud is fine. Bluetooth cloud with a side of hazelnut iced coffee would be ideal.

Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if the application also synced up with my FitBit (or Shine or whatever other fitness tracker is the thing in use these days) so that I could see how exercise plots against blood sugar checks or insulin doses? Yes, yes it would.

Another excellent detail would be if the application, upon access the diabetes devices, would confirm that each device is synced up with the right time zone. So when I travel and the clock on my phone is updated, so are my devices.

And lastly, NO DONGLES. I can’t handle that word. It’s too silly.

I know this kind of application isn’t flashy enough, and doesn’t benefit each respective company enough to actually work together and create something cohesive and workable, with an easy data flow and an even easier user interface, but whatever. A girl can dream, right?

HON Code

DISCLAIMER:

I am not a doctor. I am not a certified diabetes educator. I have no medical degree. Nothing on this site should be taken as medical advice, and if you are taking it as medical advice, I suggest you contact your doctor immediately for issues other than diabetes.

This is my diabetes life - if you are interested in making changes to yours, you need to consult your doctor.

If you email me, your personal information will not be shared without your permission and your email address will not be sold to any company or entity.